TV WEEKEND

TV WEEKEND; That Girl Is Loose At the Plaza Again

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: April 25, 2003

Here's what this movie is not

Me ELOISE

Ooooooooo I absolutely loathe Disney

''Eloise at the Plaza,'' an ABC made-for-television movie based on Kay Thompson's famous book, does look like the original. Its fidelity to Hilary Knight's droll pen-and-ink illustrations is almost frightening: scene after scene is an iconic tableau from ''Eloise,'' including fight night on TV, when Nanny, played quite convincingly by Julie Andrews in a bun and padded bottom, slurps Pilsener beer on the couch next to Eloise, who is armed with binoculars and an open umbrella.

Sofia Vassilieva, who plays the 6-year-old Eloise, is not the problem. Though the 10-year-old actress has a cute face and luxuriant flaxen hair, she is not so pretty that she cannot convincingly play an odd, homely child who is a nuisance in the lobby.

What this Sunday's ''Wonderful World of Disney'' has drained from the story is Kay Thompson, or at least her sly wit and melancholy undertone. And that is perhaps not so surprising given the Disney track record of bowdlerizing classics like ''Pinocchio,'' ''Mary Poppins'' and ''Peter Pan.'' But the best Disney movies added something fresh -- animation, music and color -- to compensate for the excisions of sophisticated humor and pathos. ''Eloise at the Plaza'' fills the missing spaces with drearily predictable plot twists and mawkish sentiment -- all the very things Thompson fought so fiercely to avert.

The creators even added love affairs and two weepy reconciliations between estranged parents and various children (three, if you count the return of Eloise's mother at the end). Even Nanny gets a beau.

Kay Thompson must be rolling, rolling, rolling in her grave.

A legendary show business figure who played a Diana Vreelandesque fashion editor alongside Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in the 1957 musical ''Funny Face,'' Thompson was a notoriously over-protective author. Horrified by a 1956 television version of her book, she restricted the marketing of Eloise a few years later, and also yanked three of her own sequels out of publication. She banned all future screen versions. When she died, in 1998, however, so did her fastidious rules. Last year, for the first time, Simon & Schuster published ''Eloise Takes a Bawth,'' which became an instant best seller. Thompson had written it in the 1960's, but considered it inferior to the first book.

Perhaps to appease her finicky ghost, the creators of the television movie fill the screen with shades of rose and fuchsia, and Eloise blurts out the phrase, ''Think pink!,'' a coy reference to the fashion diktat Thompson issued in ''Funny Face.'' Even the entrance to the Plaza is bathed in bubble-gum pink light.

There are some small, careless anachronisms: Mrs. Daniels, a pushy socialite mother, bullies her shy debutante daughter to apply to Harvard, which in 1955 was an all-male university. (In the 1950's, bluestockings went to the sister school, Radcliffe, while fashionable society women preferred Vassar.)

Overall, however, the film captures the fashion and glamour of the times quite well. What it loses is the book's perversity, its impudent mockery of conventional pieties.

In 1955, the year ''Eloise'' came out, Lee Ann Meriwether was crowned Miss America, and the top-rated television show was ''The $64,000 Question'' on CBS. Eisenhower was president, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was tarnished but still in office. That year, the Brooklyn Dodgers finally beat the New York Yankees in the World Series, the Soviet Union coaxed seven East European nations into the Warsaw Pact and Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus.

''Eloise'' was part of a different 1955. Hers was the year that Nabokov published ''Lolita,'' that ''Marty'' won the Oscar for Best Picture and Cole Porter's musical ''Silk Stockings'' opened at the Imperial Theater in New York.

Thompson's book was on best-seller lists along with Graham Greene's ''Quiet American'' but its irreverence and frivolity echoed the songs of Tom Lehrer, whose first album came out in 1953; the funny-macabre illustrations of Edward Gorey; and even the cruel wit of Kingsley Amis's ''Lucky Jim.''

Theirs was a postwar generation that had wearied of piety and sentimentality. Perhaps fearing that this post-Iraq war generation has lost its sense of humor and sophistication, Disney has imposed the very virtues that Thompson's partisans disdained the most.

In a comical story where loneliness and neglect are always lurking under the charm, the film's creators have crammed every cranny with cookie-cutter romance and treacly family reunions. Eloise befriends a proper young boy whose mother is dead, and who is exiled to boarding school by his busy, distant father (Madeline's Pepito with a touch of Colin in ''A Secret Garden''). Faster than you can say Pollyanna, Eloise engineers a father-and-son rapprochement. She helps her tutor, Philip (''that's quite enough Eloise''), woo a reluctant debutante, and arranges a tête-à-tête between Nanny and Sir Wilkes, an elderly hotel guest whom Nanny secretly admires.

Nanny, meanwhile, manages to melt the icy self-absorption of Mrs. Daniels, so she, too, can weepily come to an understanding with her daughter.

The performances are all quite good, and Jeffrey Tambor, who played the sidekick Hank (''Hey, now!'') on ''The Larry Sanders Show,'' brings his own patented brand of obsequious pomposity to his part as Mr. Salomone, the hotel manager. Eve Crawford, who plays the social-climbing Mrs. Daniels, is a find: she has an exquisitely long nose that in profile makes her look a little like Irving Penn's portraits of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives.

Christine Baranski, who played the martini-swilling divorcée on ''Cybill,'' has high billing but only a small, tacked-on part as an events planner who is on the receiving end of a pitcher of water that Eloise pours down the mail chute. She will be featured more prominently in the sequel, ''Eloise at Christmastime.''

Hilary Knight makes a cameo appearance as a sidewalk sketch artist. And Donald Trump has no cameos at all, which is at least a cause for celebration.